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To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an
outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat
while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the
other hand every being is in identity with its prior as long as
it holds that contact.
In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is
one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to
that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of
sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in soul
entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its
reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the
sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent to its
being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of
movement in general.
But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or
topmost boughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the
soul that was present in them? Simply, whence it came: soul never
knew spatial separation and therefore is always within the
source. If you cut the root to pieces, or burn it, where is the
life that was present there? In the soul, which never went
outside of itself.
No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in
something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still
somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means
merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power
reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn
can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching
upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here
must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the
Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from soul as being
still more free.
Soul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that
characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere.
If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly
achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has
centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that
mid-region is Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself- nothing
else because deriving thence [and therefore of that name and
rank], yet not that because the Intellectual-Principle in giving
it forth is not merged into it.
There exists, thus, a life, as it were, of huge extension, a
total in which each several part differs from its next, all
making a self-continuous whole under a law of discrimination by
which the various forms of things arise with no effacement of any
prior in its secondary.
But does this Soul-phase in the vegetal order, produce nothing?
It engenders precisely the Kind in which it is thus present: how,
is a question to be handled from another starting-point.
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